Italian Producers Project

Italian Producers Project

Producers and Production Practices in the History of Italian Cinema, 1949-1975

This AHRC-funded project brings together a core group of researchers with established expertise in different aspects of the film industry to examine the way Italian producers shaped global film production and distribution between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s. It explores a wide range of business practices and the domestic and international contexts in which these developed. These practices played a crucial role in building international markets for Italian films and creating production and distribution strategies which turned Italian cinema into a global force. The project will produce a range of outputs that will reinterpret the history of postwar Italian cinema and benefit both present and future scholars and those interested in Italian and international film culture more generally, as well as sectors of the cinema industry itself.

News

22 June 2018: Drawing from his research on the Producers Project, Stephen Gundle delivered the opening address of the Made in Italy conference (19-20 June, University of Bologna). His keynote considered how Italy was marketed to the world through fiction films of the middle of the 20th century, including La Dolce Vita and Roman Holiday.

11 May 2018: Producers Project investigator Dr Karl Schoonover gave a keynote lecture at Kings College London, entitled 'Neorealist Labour Extraction,' in which he shared new research findings on the politics of production during some the making of Italy's most famous films.

Click here for more videos from the project's first open workshop held in June 2016 at the University of Warwick.

Work underway in archives

The team's investigators and researchers have begun integrating a series of collections at the Cineteca di Bologna, and they have already begun making key discoveries about the history of film production in Italian during the twentieth century. Click here to see more details on the work underway.